Watching the World Swimming Championships from a hotel room whilst on holiday very recently made an article about GB swimming and the lack of medals in the recently completed World Championships in Barcelona an interesting read.

How the new team in charge of British swimming will do will not be known until next year, maybe not even then, as producing medal winning teams is not an overnight process.

There is a lot of work for the newly appointed Chris Spice and Bill Furniss to do and they will already be only too aware of the pressures they are under to produce medals in next year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

Swimming is not something I particularly enjoy myself, I have a tendency to sink in the water, my heavy discus throwers’ legs being the root cause I suspect, but my wife goes to the pool regularly and would do so even more if it were easier.

This is something that was brought home to us only too clearly on our walking holiday in Switzerland, during which we watched said Championships a little. One of our overnight stays was in Lenk, population 2500, where we enjoyed a couple of hours at the local pool complex which happened to have an indoor 25m pool, and an outdoor 50m pool.

Another stopover was in Adelboden, population 3500, and they too have a 50m pool. Admittedly both towns expand considerably with the arrival of tourists, especially during the ski season, but the point is made – in many countries, not just Switzerland, access to Olympic size pools is much, much easier than it is in the UK.

Building more pools is not going to solve Swimming GB’s problems though, and the money will not be there to do that anyway.

I wish Spice and Furniss the best of luck in the year ahead of them, they know where they are, they know where media and public expectation wants them to be, let’s hope they are left alone to get on with it.

The British cycling team have achieved incredible success under the leadership of Dave Brailsford, in the shape of Olympic medals and Tour de France successes this year and last, so it shows it can be done.

Does this have any relation to school sport though I wonder? Swimming takes place in all schools of course, at least until the point where the children can swim a certain distance. Thereafter, there might be swimming galas, whether they are inter-house, or inter-school.

Swimming is never going to be a major sport in schools though as other sports like football in particular are always going to be more popular.

Polam Hall does run an inter-house gala every year, for juniors and seniors, but our very best swimmers are all members of local clubs.

This is not surprising really as the commitment required in swimming from participants, parents and coaches is incredible and the club environment is where the right facilities and right people come together to make it all happen.

Quite a few of our pupils are members at Darlington Swimming Club and a smaller number are members at Richmond Dales Amateur Swimming Club which was the club of Olympians Nicola and Joanne Jackson.

It is unrealistic to expect schools to be able to provide the expertise, facilities and commitment necessary to take swimmers to the levels that the clubs can achieve, but if the right local structures are in place, then pupils can transition to clubs easily enough and start their way up the ladder from there.

The local inter-school gala in Darlington this last academic year, for example, was well attended by coaching staff from Darlington Swimming Club and it was good to see them praising their existing members and chatting to potential new ones.